Monthly Archives: October 2010

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The relentless mantra from the NAACP, liberals, many in the media, and most Democrats is that the Tea Party is chock full of blatant or closet racists. It’s true that the very thought of a black man in the White House turns the stomachs of many tea party activists and they make no bones about that. But the race rap against the Tea Party misses the point — why its roared on the scene seemingly from nowhere, caught the fancy of the public and the media, triggered a nervous twitch among Democrats, and sent terror through the GOP mainstream.

Two decades ago, the GOP found that the volatile mix of big government and economics could whip frustrated, rebellious, angry whites into a tizzy far better than crude race baiting. Many blue-collar white males were losing ground to minorities and women in the workplace, schools, and in society. The target of their anger was big government that tilted unfairly in spending priorities toward social programs that benefited minorities at the expense of hard-working whites. Tea baggers rail at Obama, the Democrats, big government, the elites, and Wall Street. Yet, they also grouse about abortion, family values, gay rights, and tax cuts — not race.

Rightwing populism, with its mix of xenophobia, loath of government as too liberal, too tax-and-spend, and too permissive, and a killer of personal freedom has been the engine that powered Reagan and Bush White House wins. Blowing off the tea party as a bunch of closet and hooded rednecks misses that point, too.

For the Mad Hatter, in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, life is a perpetual tea party, and it is always 6 PM.Nothing, of course, makes sense. Criminals are punished before they commit a crime rather than after. Sometimes they are punished even when no crime is ever committed. In other words, this is a satire for today’s topsy-turvy time.

As with all radicals, left or right, Tea Party people tend towards both absolutist and reductionist positions. Compromise, otherwise known as central to the art of politics, is the enemy of principled integrity and almost every principle is taken past its logical conclusion to a point of Louis Carroll absurdity, “The Queen had one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. “Off with his head!” she said without even looking around.”…Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Chapter 8

So, if one believes that government is the problem then eliminate as much of it as possible. Get rid of regulation. Let the magic of the market work its, well, magic. Department of Education is a bureaucracy. Get rid of it. Some Tea Party folks want to eliminate public education itself. ObamaCare, a government takeover? Perform the Obamaectomy. Medicare a wasteful unconstitutional assault? Off with it’s head. Down with Social Security. Minimum wage is, as with all regulation, a job killer. Gone in 60 seconds. Workplace safety? Who needs it? Unions? Socialists ruining America. Laissez Faire is the only fair way to go.

In the eternal 6 PM of the Tea Party, there is no stem-cell research and no theory of evolution. Private property reigns supreme, and we don’t have to open our businesses to Blacks, Jews or Gays if we don’t want. There is no abortion because we have taught abstinence so successfully. The Constitution is in its original form, slavery is legal and women can’t vote. No Mama Grizzlies were envisioned by the Founders. Pity.

Through the astigmatism of nostalgia for a past imperfectly remembered, we see the world in black and white (but without too much black) . This is a prelapsarian world where the state of man, and nature, is innocence. A tempting vision. Truly. Not evil but nave.

This election makes me want to take an extra shower or two every day. It is so dirty and degrading, so toxic to the body politic that I go around with an airsickness bag from all the sickness that is on the air in the form of attack ads.

The old clichs are wrong. Once upon a time we may have campaigned in poetry and governed in prose, but today it is an unending barrage of garbage, half-truths, distortions and lies. Despite the partisanship that threatens to sink the ship of state, both sides offend. I have learned from TV that Carli Fiorina just loves shipping American jobs to China and that (Jewish) Barbara Boxer hates Israel. I now know that Meg Whitman loves sending jobs to Iran and Jerry Brown is pro cop killer. Sigh.

While I have strong political feelings, these distortions of record and character are not good for us as a nation. They discourage the middle of our political spectrum which is rapidly and understandably becoming cynical even despondent. Only the extremes are energized by these ersatz facts.

This is not simply a California problem. From taking on Rand Paul’s college silliness to taking seriously the charge that Christine O’Donnell is witch or her very wealthy capitalist opponent Chris Coons was actually a “bearded Marxist” in college, this election is about everything but the real issues: Job, war and how to build up the economy.

No one dares actually present any substantive plans because any Democratic idea is a “job killer”, and any Republican idea only “for the rich.” And one more nauseating development: The xenophobia is dangerous and disgusting. In a truly global economy, both parties are running against outsourcing and the evil Chinese. Both are playing on our fear of immigrants–which is code for Hispanics.

I would like to think that we, as a nation, are better than this. But every day I am bombarded with evidence to the contrary. Time to shower again.

The new Gallup survey can’t get much more galling. It shows that more Democrats would be more likely to vote for a Democratic candidate for office if Bill Clinton pitched the candidate than if President Obama did. Even more galling than that is that independents say that they would be far less likely to vote for a candidate that Obama pitched than one that Clinton pitched. So what does Bill have that Obama doesn’t have for far too many Democrats and just about all independents?

To start with he’s not a sitting president who has been pounded from pillar to post from the instant that he put his toe in the White House. Clinton has the luxury of not just the time and distance he’s been removed from the White House, but the image and embrace as a wise, elder statesman who has much to offer Democrats on winning elections. That’s just the start. The even tougher truth to swallow for the White House is that Clinton is still fondly even rapturously regarded as the Democrat who got things done. He was not embroiled in a major war, the economy hummed, be beat back every major political and legal challenge from the GOP Clinton loathers and baiters, he was a cash cow for Democratic candidates and incumbents, he did a course correction with the Democratic Party that transformed it from a party stigmatized as one that pandered to minorities, and thumbed its nose at the White middle class, to one that championed their interests. He was and obviously is still seen by Democrats as the consummate professional, charismatic, Democrat that can deliver the goods. It’s the Clinton mystique all over again, and it hasn’t lost one bit of allure.

There’s one more thing that makes Clinton the one Democrat who’s still most in demand and listened to by other Democrats, that thing is desperation. The GOP hatchet job on Obama has been so diabolically effective that Democrats have scattered to the hills in panic, despair and disillusionment. The mantra from virtually every political analyst, pundit, GOP echo box, and even many top Democrats, is that the midterms will be a colossal wipe out for Democrats. And the blame for that lay with one Democrat, and only one Democrat, President Obama. Many of the Democrats that rode Obama’s coat tails to victory in November 2008 are avoiding him like the plague. Some have gone further and depicted themselves in ads and saber rattling speeches and interviews as the anti-Democrat Democrat. They brag that they have cut bait with Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at every turn. Clinton then is the shining light, their one beacon of hope if not to stem the alleged November massacre at least to dampen some of the worst effects.
There’s a final galling note in the Gallup survey. It found that Obama’s negative impact as recorded in its survey data showed that if he campaigned for a Democratic candidate or incumbent that it could rev up GOP voters to vote for the Democrat’s GOP rival. Some of that is already seen in Nevada where Senate minority leader Harry Reid is in a race to the wire with Tea Party backed Looney Sharron Angle.

Obama has repeatedly gone to bat for Reid in campaign appearances in the state with Reid in tow. But Clinton pitched Reid in the state too. If Gallup is right then that didn’t hurt Reid. The hurt though is in the thought that a former president can do more for his party than the man who heads the party.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts a nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk show on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

President Obama will play the race card when he needs to play it. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. He shouted to a crowd at Bowie State University in Maryland not to make him look bad. The pitch to black voters is to get out in November and vote like your life depends on it. That means voting to save a slew of endangered Congressional Democrats. The stakes are well-known. A GOP grab of the House, even without the Senate, will almost certainly mean endless committee investigations of Obama administration actions, funding and appropriation stalls and sabotage, and a relentless no to every Obama initiative from energy to immigration reform. The escalation of congressional wars would be distracting, debilitating, and pose deep danger to Obama’s reelection bid in 2012.

Appealing directly to black voters for help is not a desperation move. It’s a smart and necessary political move. Black voters are more than just the underpin of the Democratic Party. They also make up a significant percent of the voters in districts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Alabama, Indiana, and Florida where endangered Democrats are battling insurgent GOP candidates to keep their seats. The strategic placement of black voters made the difference in Ohio, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania in 2008 in his White House win. In these states McCain gapped Obama with white blue collar, rural, and older white voters. Black voters filled in the gap. November is no different. Polls show that there is a high interest among black voters in the mid-term election. Apathy and indifference is not as endemic as assumed.

But it will take soul stirring and direct appeals to insure that they get to the polls. Obama is the only Democrat that can do it. He’s still wildly popular among blacks. And their anger and fear that his presidency is in danger heightens the sense of urgency to vote.

This isn’t the first time Obama has made a racial pitch. During the campaign his candidacy was on the line in the first Democratic presidential primary in January 2008 in South Carolina. Then Democratic rival Hillary Clinton was the front runner. She appeared to have a lock on the black vote in the state where blacks made up nearly half the Democratic voting numbers. A win there and she would have had the wind blowing gale force at her back as she rolled into the other primaries in the South where black voters made up a substantial percent of the Democratic primary voters. Obama quickly dialed up the one African-American with the name recognition, cachet and appeal to stir a racial course correction away from Hillary. That was Oprah. She held two giant campaign rallies complete with the gay bashing, but immensely popular Gospel singer Donnie McClurkin. Oprah virtually commanded blacks to do their racial duty and back Obama. It worked and the rest is history.

There’s another compelling reason to justify Obama’s politically practical and savvy necessity to use race. The GOP has done it for four decades and is doing it openly and quietly this time around.

The shouts, taunts, spitting, catcalls, joker posters, N word slurs, Confederate and Texas Lone Star flag waving by tea party activists at their early rallies, the billboards that crop up along highways and back roads that depict Obama as a communist, terrorist, and racially mocking caricatures, and the recycled racially leaden code words, slogans, and digs have been an indispensable political necessity for the GOP.

The GOP could not have been competitive during campaign 2008 without the bail out from white conservative voters. Elections are usually won by candidates with a solid and impassioned core of bloc voters. The GOP’s conservative, white base, vote consistently and faithfully. And in elections going back three decades have voted in a far greater percentage than Hispanics and blacks in midterm elections. Polls have repeatedly shown that they are just as enthusiastic about this election partly stirred by rage at Obama, the Democrats, and government. The usual undertow of race is a driving force.
The GOP leaders have long known that their constituents can be easily aroused to vote and shout loudly on the emotional wedge issues; abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and tax cuts. For fourteen months, they whipped up their hysteria and borderline racism against health care reform. These are the very voters that GOP presidents and aspiring presidents, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush, and McCain and legions of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons banked for victory and to seize and maintain regional and national political dominance.

Obama did the right thing when faced with the prospect of defeat in a key presidential primary by Hillary. He played directly to the black vote. In November his presidency doesn’t hinge on a massive black voter turnout. His prestige, legislative agenda, and orderly White House governance do. If it takes playing the race card to get results then there’s nothing wrong with that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts a nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk show on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Seventeen NATO soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in the last three days.NATO is not immediately releasing the nationalities of these troops. Yes, we know that there are other nations participating–in small numbers–and that each death is a tragedy, but this non-disclosure of nationalities is, or should be, unacceptable to the American people and to our media.

I can personally be as angry and upset at our policy (actually Obama’s policy) as I want, but there is little I can do to change it. Voting does not seem a good option since the Republicans can be counted on to pursue the same policy or even worse. But I am truly at a loss to understand why anyone right, left or center accepts this cover up.

Not releasing the numbers of Americans killed in action is Obama’s version of the Bush administration’s refusal to allow the photographing of the returning caskets containing our soldiers. Bush was afraid of the negative impact that the truth would have on our morale and so is Obama.

I am sure that this is particularly difficult for Obama now that we have reached that iconic moment that John Kerry created in 1971 when he asked rhetorically, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Make no mistake, we have once again clearly come to that moment. We are now facilitating talks between the corrupt narco-regime of our “friend” Hamid Karzai and the brutal and evil Taliban. We are rightly itching to declare victory and get out, but in the mean time, in these mean times, we are asking our people to die. And they are.

Obama understands that there will be no victory. No peace treaty will end this hell. There will be no moment when the Taliban is tamed or the War Lords stipulate to the democratic process. Obama understands that we are mired in the mud and blood of ancient enmities and that our mighty technology is sunk in the mud and immobilized. Pakistan stopping our convoys of fuel trucks at the border and making them targets for destruction is both symbol and reality. From Alexander to the mighty British Empire, from the now-defunct Soviet Union, to this: our time in hell, we know, Obama also knows there is no winning. Yet for political reasons he has to move in a deliberate and dignified appearing manner.

This gives, however, only the shallowest appearance of dignity. It is, in fact, morally monstrous to sacrifice one more life, spend one more dollar, remain one more day when we know that we have no realistic plan and that our delusions concerning our non-realistic hopes have been dashed on the hard rocks of the reality of Afghanistan.

I believe that “We the People” would not tolerate this if it were reported in a timely and accurate manner. Yes, I blame Obama for the continuation of this clearly failed policy. I also blame the media. We are not doing our due-diligence. The People have a right to know.

Today’s the day, young people. And more than ever, which has been made abundantly clear in the ruthless, circuslike midterm election campaigning by what truly have become political “characters,” we cannot afford to disengage from politics. Not now.

Tonight, President Barack Obama will host a townhall meeting geared toward young adults. The hour-long discussion, sponsored by MTV, BET and CMT networks, will air live at 4 p.m. E.T. Live coverage will also be available on MTV.com, BET.com and CMT.com.

Questions will be solicited via Twitter. Here’s how to ask your questions as described via The White House Blog.

The President will be taking questions from the live audience and Twitter. To ask your question, just use the hashtag #ask plus the topic of your question. For example, if your question is about jobs use #askjobs, if it’s about energy use #askenergy. You can also comment the event using the hashtag #comment. Be sure to tune in tomorrow at 4 PM EDT to see if your question gets asked.

Our job as U.S. citizens didn’t stop in 2008 with the presidential election. Let’s keep the fire in our bellies.

Jonathan, that incident between Hotlips and Frank was funny. Even Frank Burns having a nervous breakdown was funny because he was neurotic, and it went with the character. But that is television, and it isn’t real. Even the reality shows aren’t completely real because the producers are often goading the contestants to fight.

But there is a line between television and real life. And even though the boundaries of normal, common decency have dropped faster than the Zeppelin, I’ve seen things on TV that may cause someone to get carted away on the streets.

I agree that the problem is that all the cyber bullying and the incident with Tyler Clementi and his roommate, Dharun Ravi and his friend, Molly Wei, crossed the line. The difference between you and me is that I believe that they knew full well what they were doing and that they knew that they were being cruel. What they and no one could have predicted is that Tyler Clementi would react by taking his own life. Molly Wei’s lawyer says that she is innocent, but he is being bribed/paid to say that as most people would assume that she and Ravi knew they were doing the wrong thing. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have acted in secret. They knew that they were humiliating Clementi to the point where he would have been afraid to show his face in public, and for this those two spoiled brats and their parents should pay, and dearly. They should also be expelled from school.

Most troubling is the frequency with which this has been happening. At Mentor High School in a small suburb of Cleveland, Ohio had four suicides in the past two years spurred on by bullying. In the case of, Sladjana Vidovic, the bullies who taunted her shortly before she hung herself had the utter audacity to laugh at her in front of her family as she lay in her casket.

These kids almost make Hawkeye Pierce look like a five year-old playing with matches. So what has changed from then until now? Some point to videos and misfits like Snoop Dogg, Soulja Boy and other rappers and hip hop artists who have about as much social conscience as a cannonball, but it really goes beyond that.

It goes all the way back to where it starts. It goes back to the ones who birthed them, and supposedly loved them and did a half-baked job of raising them. It goes back to the first people who taught them their values and right from wrong. It goes back to their parents, or loosely speaking, the ones who brought them into this world before hoisting them onto society shortly thereafter. Heaven help us all some of the time.

Perhaps the aunt of one of the ne’er do-wells of the Latin King Goonies charged with the recent beatings of a homosexual teenager and his adult partner in New York City say it all. When questioned about her nephew’s presence in the gathering that spawned the violence against these two men, she said her nephew is “innocent and does not belong to any gang.”

Like a wise sage once opined, “Denial ain’t necessarily a river in Egypt.

An only slightly repentant former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a well-heeled, prestigious conference crowd on the Future of Asia at the Chinese University of Hong Kong last March that she had doubts and misgivings over the way things ultimately turned out in Iraq. If she had it to do all over again she’d press her boss, President Bush, to make a better effort to get the Iraqis more involved in the grunt work of actually rebuilding the war ravaged country.

Rice, of course, tactfully left out to two important omissions to the conference crowd. One it was her and the circle of hardnosed war hawks that hectored, badgered, and hammered Bush to launch the war that ravaged the country. A war that is now virtually universally regarded as a failed, flawed, wasteful, and grotesquely unnecessary war.
Rice’s second even more damning omission is that to sell the war as indispensable to the war on terrorism she and the hawks distorted, exaggerated facts and events, and flat out lied. But seven years later, with Bush safely gone from the White House, and more than a few fingers happily but wrongly pointing at the Obama administration for Bush’s Iraq misadventure, and Rice safely ensconced back at Stanford University, she can gloss over Iraq, and instead concentrate on painting a compelling and sympathetic picture of herself as a black woman who suffered the sting of racial persecution, bigotry and even the threat of violence to rise to a pivotal political figure.

At first glance, the story she tells in her memoir, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People” is extraordinary. She recounts the segregated schools, swimming pools, libraries, and housing, the voting exclusion, and the always ever pervasive threat of physical violence, that was part of the tapestry of 1950s Jim Crow, Bull Conner terrorized Birmingham, Alabama she grew up in. She talks about the strength, perseverance and determination of her parents and their constant push to instill in their sons and daughters the value of education. Education they knew was a surefire ticket out of a self-imposed America’s self-imposed racial trap for blacks.

Rice took the message to heart and her personal success story is well-known. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974 where she enrolled at the age of 15; her master’s degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1975. And she got her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981. Her years as an influential and much sought after international affairs expert and planner which culminated in her pick as Bush’s first National security Advisor and then Secretary of State are just as well-known.
These are truly breakthroughs, even pioneering, glass ceiling shattering breakthroughs for a woman of color and can inspire other young women to attain the heights. In any other time, place, and especially with any other administration other than Bush’s, Rice would be hailed and lauded as the political affairs Rosa Parks. She would deservedly be held up as a worthy model of what a black woman with grit and tenacity can do to smash her way out of the suffocating racial and gender boxes.

That’s not the case with Rice, though. Mention the name Condoleezza Rice even now and the reaction among Bush bashers and most blacks is still pretty much the same as what it was when singer-activist Harry Belafonte in 2006 blasted her and Colin Powell as “house Negroes.” Belafonte’s blast drew near universal applause from blacks. It almost certainly would still get the same reaction today from most blacks.

It would be the rarest of sights to find Rice’s picture on the walls and in the showcases of inner city schools that festoon them with the faces and names of prominent black figures. The hostility to and dismissal of Rice hinges on that as part of the reviled Bush administration she was a racial traitor. It’s grossly unfair to lay that tag on her. Her accomplishments are undeniable, and they shouldn’t be cavalierly sloughed off. There’s even some evidence that she spoke up at a critical point when Bush was gung ho to scrap the affirmative action program at the University of Michigan in 2003. Rice softened the Bush position by publicly protesting that race could be used as a factor in school admissions. The court agreed.

This didn’t change the loathe of Rice by many blacks and Bush loathers then. And her admirable fight to overcome racial adversity won’t change or soften their opinion of her now. Condi’s remarkable personal triumphant over the racial odds were praiseworthy then and they still are. Unfortunately, her moving civil rights story can’t trump the role she played in Bush’s despicable Iraq folly.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts a nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk show on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

In the 1970 movie M*A*S*H*, Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John, put a microphone in the tent where uptight Frank Burns and Hotlips O’Houlihan were trysting. Their lovemaking, the sighs, the moans and the urgency, was broadcast throughout the base.

Of course, in 1970, I laughed. It was funny, a prank. As I think about the movie today, I remember something that had slipped my mind. Yes, I laughed at Hotlips, but she recovered and got past the incident. Frank Burns did not. He had a mental breakdown and was taken away in a straightjacket. He was broken by a limited live broadcast of a heterosexual encounter. Imagine if it had been on the Net, where it would have lived forever, and it had been gay.

Rutgers student Tyler Clementi committed suicide after webcam pictures of him having gay sex were put up on the Net. While I have no way of knowing the feelings or intentions of the students who took these and distributed these pictures, it was clearly an act of cruelty meant to embarrass him. It clearly and tragically worked.

It is possible that to the other students this was meant only to embarrass and not truly humiliate or destroy Clementi; perhaps it was only a joke. Now however the consequences should be obvious to everyone considering invading the privacy of anyone–gay or straight. This kind of activity is not a prank. It isn’t funny.

The world has changed in the last 40 years. In at least one way, it has changed for the better. We no longer accept as a prank the humiliating of another person or the destruction of their dignity.

God knows some volunteer for humiliation by lining up to do reality TV, but that is their choice. Because some waive any concept of privacy or shame does not imply that others can be subjected to public humiliation at the pleasure, or for the pleasure, of others.

This is a story rich with material for serious discussion and consideration. It involves expectations of privacy, bullying and, of course, gay bashing. It is a kind of microcosm of some of our society’s most sensitive issues.